This Week In The Supreme Court

The Defense Of Marriage Act -- and, my god, what an odious piece of legislative euphemism that was -- always was a breathtakingly cynical piece of electioneering that was doomed at its noxious birth by changing social mores and inexorably age-related demographic logic. We should pause for a moment and give a thought to Mary Bonauto, the brave lawyer from Maine who fought and won the Goodridge decision before the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth -- God save it! -- and to Margaret Marshall, the brave chief justice of said Supreme Judicial Court at the time, both of whom combined to get the ball rolling in the first place. Once marriage equality was established here and the earth did not split, nor the skies darken, nor seven-headed beasts rise from the sea -- and, rather, a lot of function halls and wedding boutiques and B&B's found their business doubling -- what happened in the Supreme Court of the United States today was inevitable. In 100 years, our great-grandchildren are going to wonder what all the fuss and bother was about.

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The opinion, delivered by Justice Anthony (Weathervane) Kennedy, gave Clinton -- and, by proxy, political genius Dick Morris -- as well as the congressional cowards who voted for this abomination, a pretty good whack upside the head.

"The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity...By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment."

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On the other hand, at least the Congress back in those days was capable of passing something, so there's that. As for the Court's punting the Proposition 8 case from California, give this Court a chance to do nothing, or to do something good, and it will choose the former. (I've already had at least two very smart legal minds try to explain Kennedy's dissent on this one and they sound like college freshmen reading Finnegans Wake for the first time, but they seem to agree that the decision is not as ironclad as marriage-equality people want it to be.) Give it a chance to do nothing or to do something retrograde and awful and, well, you have the rest of the week's decisions, I guess.

In sum, it turned out to be a very good week for gay people who want to get married. It turned out to be a very bad week for minority voters, for employees, and for the country as a whole. I am sorry, but the accumulated weight of the awful is coloring my happiness at what happened today. (And, by the way, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act means that states are free to gerrymander and shenanigan their way to get gay marriage bans approved in their various state legislatures. My own puzzling out of the Prop 8 punt leads me to that conclusion. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong.) People sickened by generic drugs have less legal recourse than they did. Discrimination and harassment in the workplace are permissible as long as "supervisors" subcontract the job and, of course, we have attained the day of jubilee on race relations. Samuel Alito stands revealed as one of the pre-eminently destructive -- and supercilious -- dickheads of our time and Clarence Thomas continues to exercise his self-loathing on the rest of American society, with horrible consequences. We lose DOMA and the Voting Rights Act in the same week. To me, that's not even a tie. Forgive me if I can muster only two cheers for it.